Jerry Conner Video Released

In the summer of 1990, Minh and Linda Rogers were shot to death while working at their family-owned grocery in rural Gates County, North Carolina. Some money was taken. Sixteen year-old Linda was raped. The next year, Jerry Wayne Conner was tried and sentenced to death for the murders. His sentence was overturned on appeal, but after a re-sentencing hearing in 1995, Mr. Conner was again sentenced to die. In May of 2006, Conner came within 36 hours of execution before the North Carolina Supreme Court intervened. The Court didn't want Jerry Conner to be killed until he had the chance to apply modern DNA technology to the semen found on Linda Rogers' body. Unfortunately, the semen sample was too degraded to produce conclusive results.

We may never know if Jerry Conner killed Minh and Linda Rogers seventeen years ago. What we do know is that if and when lethal injection returns to North Carolina, Conner will be among the first scheduled to die. With that in mind, his attorneys have released a video on YouTube highlighting another major issue in the case: juror misconduct.

A local news reporter who covered Mr. Conner's first trial sat on his re-sentencing jury. The reporter/juror learned confidential facts about the case before, during, and after the first trial through her contacts with the Sheriff's Department and others involved in the investigation of the murders. When questioned directly about communications with people involved in the case, she did not tell the court what she knew. Her deceptions denied Mr. Conner his right to be tried by an impartial jury.

More information about Jerry Conner's case is available here, here, and here.

During this brief respite from executions, it is important to remember that there are still thousands of men and women out there awaiting their final day. Daily we are adding to the queue - men and women afflicted by mental illness, represented by incompetent lawyers, convicted based on the false testimony of jailhouse snitches and crooked police officers. While Ralph Baze has taken center stage to tell the nation about the constitutional perils of lethal injection, Jerry Conner is waiting in the wings with an equally important story to tell about the broken system used to decide who is sentenced to die in the first place.